By zanymonster on
I have not used Drupal in quite a few years. It was cool then, and now, I am just amazed at the progress that has been made on the project! Anyway, I have spent the past couple weeks installing, playing, re-acquainting, reading, testing, etc. I am not up to date with CSS and don't remember PHP very well, but have found several base themes that look well documented and flexible. My question to those that know what they're doing is simple:
What base themes do you use for theming, and why?
I want quick, easy, flexible, and pretty.... All with adaptive display control. Looks like fusion may be best, but before I spend days and weeks learning how to theme from it, I thought it best to seek advice from folks with experience!
Thanks!
Comments
First I'd say this - its the
First I'd say this - its the right horse for the right course, don't listen to the deluge of religious fanatics that will likely pound issues like this with their flavor of the month. The sharp reality is only you can decided because only you know the specific requirements of your project. Again the religious fanatics will say this doesn't matter because their favorite is so awesome and amazing it can even make them cups of tea. This is not so - no base theme is a one-size-fits-all pullover.
I would say this though, within the top 4 base themes for Drupal, that's Zen, Adaptivetheme, Omega and Fusion you are going to cover 99% of your use cases.
If you need layout control Adaptivetheme has mega power, especially the 7.x-3.x branch, because it supports not only its own responsive layout engine but supports Panels and Display Suite with responsive layouts also. All this is in the name of automagical support for mobile and tablet devices. The layouts switch and respond depending on the screen size. Its also light, fast and easy to theme with, and includes a tonne of features aimed at easing site and theme development for modern Drupal 7 base websites. http://drupal.org/project/adaptivetheme
Fusion, well, I dunno. I never really liked Fusion tbh, mainly because the markup is very bloated and it doesn't really give me much for the cost of that markup overhead. Also its not responive, but does have a mobile sub-theme if you go the route of having a seperate mobile theme/site, because you're planning to support mobile, right?
These descriptors quick, easy, flexible, well, all depends on what you mean by that. "Pretty" is in the eye of the beholder, for me it means beautiful code, for you it might mean something else.
Pimp your Drupal 8 Toolbar - make it badass.
Adaptivetheme - theming system for people who don't code.
I don't use any base theme, i
I don't use any base theme, i create themes from scratch. I create info file, define regions and CSS, JS files and other things in it. Then i reset CSS(by adding a reset.css file) and create my own CSS styles(generally i use 2 CSS files: layout.css and style.css).
And only if it is really necessary, i create special .tpl files(if site will have a complex structure, lots of special regions etc.).
Why?
1 - It is easier to create a theme from scratch than to learn an existing theme(at least, for me).
2 - You can fully customize the look and structure of your theme, no limits.
3 - Clean, known code; no unnecesarry codes.
4 - Freedom.
5 - Etc.
Mediasaur | http://www.mediasaur.com/en | http://twitter.com/mediasaur
Before asking for help, please read this http://slash7.com/2006/12/22/vampires/ and don't be a "Help Vampire". :)
#2, sounds like you are
#2, sounds like you are building really basic themes there, looking at the one you have contributed, yes, that is the case. Problem is you probably have no real clue just how advanced some of the base themes are, and make some pretty heavy assumptions about what using a base theme might and might not mean.
Your clean known code, as per your GIT project, is verbose, wasteful and even includes totally unused reset styles, a copy/paste of Meyers reset which every Drupal themer worth his or her salt knows is mostly a waste of time in Drupal, you need a far more granular approach to resetting CSS in Drupal.
As for the the stuff about the look and structure, well, that is patently untrue (your implication is that base themes limit this, this is not accurate at all). The vast majority of base themes use standard template or theme function overrides to generate the output, the sky's the limit, you are only limited by your skill.
Freedom from what, or to what? I would say all you are doing is repeating, on every project, the exact same workarounds and fixes for browsers, devices etc, instead of using a DRY approach and centralizing these in a reusable repository - aka, a starter theme.
I hear this stuff all the time, sure, do what works for you, but if you want to attack and diss out starter themes, you better come with a very, very good set of arguments, and not your biased, and somewhat uneducated opinion...
...no base theme worth using would make such an horrendous accessibility faux pas. Think about it.
Pimp your Drupal 8 Toolbar - make it badass.
Adaptivetheme - theming system for people who don't code.
What a disrespectful, rude
What a disrespectful, rude reply; an attack. I'm shocked. Why? I just declared my opinion, i did not even criticise any theme or write something like that. I won't waste my time to reply your defamations. I just feel sorry for Drupal.org and Drupal universe; first time i saw this kind of disgrace around here. Hope i won't see again.
Mediasaur | http://www.mediasaur.com/en | http://twitter.com/mediasaur
Before asking for help, please read this http://slash7.com/2006/12/22/vampires/ and don't be a "Help Vampire". :)
Oh dear, wow, sorry but you
Oh dear, wow, sorry but you are way out of line here I'm afraid.
You should read that reply a few times and realize its a discussion, not an attack - yes I put your code on the line. Why not? Its a good example of why people who really don't know what they are doing should use a starter theme, at least a good one, to learn best practice. I was pointing this out to you, sorry you did not understand this most basic thing.
Look, you miss the point entirely, that's OK, I can live with that, but please, do not call me a disgrace, that is out of line, way, way out of line.
And yes, I utterly stand by what I said, if you use display:none; for an accessibility feature for the blind, then you really do not know what you are doing. Period. That is the kind of very poor mistake I see all the time, and no decent base theme would ever do this, instead they would have a best practice approach, that even YOU could learn from.
Pimp your Drupal 8 Toolbar - make it badass.
Adaptivetheme - theming system for people who don't code.
On the top of Drupal.org it
On the top of Drupal.org it says "Drupal is an open source content management..." and "Come for the software, stay for the community...". Most of us know these and that is one of the most important reason to choose Drupal.
But in this post, someone who apparently is disrespectful, arriviste and has wild capitalist mentality is overreacting if people don't choose and flatter his products and humiliating them. Do we have to use your base themes? Is this compulsary? Can't we declare our thoughts about how we create themes? Can't we share our choices? Is this a crime in Drupal.org? And most importantly, does some people has the right to humiliate others in Drupal.org? You can be a theme guru, you can be a design master, you can be the most perfect theme developer of the universe; but you can't humiliate people because of they have less experience, education etc. or because of anything. Go and do your trade on your web site, don't attack innocent people for your profit. This is Drupal.org; which is an open source world, a community platform. Nobody has to buy and flatter your products and you can't attack them because of this.
Hope an admin reads this post and does something. I really feel so sorry, disappointed and i am still in shock. There should not be this kind disgraces in Drupal.org.
PS: Sorry for my poor English; and please consider this while reading these posts.
Mediasaur | http://www.mediasaur.com/en | http://twitter.com/mediasaur
Before asking for help, please read this http://slash7.com/2006/12/22/vampires/ and don't be a "Help Vampire". :)
With all due respect,
With all due respect, criticizing CODE is also known as peer review, a core tenant of open source, and Drupal, development. It makes all better. The harshness of the criticism is usually proportional to the quality of the code.
Instead of taking it on the chin, learning from it, you chose to over react, get defensive and attack me in some sort of personal vendetta, and why, for criticizing your CODE.
Your personal attacks, dragging in off topic bullshit about business goals and so fourth is going to far. This is a warning, if you cannot behave yourself in this open source community then you have no place being here. If you cannot handle your code being criticized then do not contribute any. Everyone's job in Drupal is to review and critique CODE, so keep to the CODE discussion. Your inflammatory remarks about ME are OFF TOPIC and frankly, a waste of your time. It does not affect or concern me at all, what concerns me is your attitude to another coder who simply REVIEWED YOUR CODE.
Stick to the TOPIC which is CODE. Right? You got that?
Pimp your Drupal 8 Toolbar - make it badass.
Adaptivetheme - theming system for people who don't code.
Is there an admin seeing this
Is there an admin seeing this disgrace? Please do something. Neither me or Drupal deserve this filth.
Mediasaur | http://www.mediasaur.com/en | http://twitter.com/mediasaur
Before asking for help, please read this http://slash7.com/2006/12/22/vampires/ and don't be a "Help Vampire". :)
With all due respect, you're
With all due respect, you're upset and "disgraced" because you work has been criticised. From what I can see, everything Jeff commented on is a valid criticism. Rather than exclaim that you have personally been disrespected and disgraced and make a big song and dance about it, how about you defend your work?
I agree, I saw nothing that
I agree, I saw nothing that Jeff said as an "attack", rather he was just pointing out the flaws in Mediasaur's work. Jeff has not said anything that isn't true, and there is no need to get offended by somebody saying that what you did is wrong. We are all coders, we have all made mistakes, and I would rather someone be honest and give constructive criticism as Jeff has done, instead of lying and saying what I did was great when there are fundamental flaws in it. You don't learn that way. By the way, I use Adaptive Theme for all of my sites and I love it. It is a great base theme that takes care of the necessary little things that I don't want to deal with, while not adding a whole lot of bulky unnecessary code. You use Drupal and it's modules for essentially the same reason; it takes care of things that have already been done automatically. No need to reinvent the wheel.
I feel your pain but...
Hard to not get personal when someone tears apart your arguments, but I genuinely think you are missing the point of a community. Its not all about positive affirmation. Jeff might not have answered tactfully in your eyes, but I bet he helped you more than anyone else if you took his advice. Please don't let your sensitivity to these things taint your community experience, there is always someone who will know more than you and someone who knows less, so everyone is helpful.
Wow
Gosh. I'm new to drupal. I have watched a lot of the drupalcon videos on YouTube and thought drupal seemed like a nice community. I feel afraid to give any opinions now in the forums.
I read you reply #2 as being pretty disrespectful albiet probably true. All the member was doing were stating their personal approach. I did not read anywhere that they had condemned base themes.
You reply was pretty hostile towards them. I'm a little bit shocked to be honest.
You then made a further reply that even seemed to threaten them.
I think you could have chosen your words a bit better with your reply. I'm feeling a little sorry for the other member to be honest.
thanks so far
I am a "generalist" IT guy. A total hack. Maybe someday I can contribute, but for now, what draws me to the project is the ability to consume it. I need to get my work done, and appreciate the ability to use other's work instead of reinventing the wheel. I have found basically no limitation to the layout control and styling available to me with any if the popular base themes and various modules I have checked out so far. I agree the sky is the limit, which I appreciate very much! I am looking more for personal experiences with using the base themes than I am wanting to start a philosophical debate.
What BASE themes do folks flock to the most, and why? What hurdles have folks run into with different base themes specifically? These are the sort of answers I am looking for.
Thanks!
Look, this is really easy
Look, this is really easy question to answer, just look at the big four base themes - Zen, Fusion, Adaptivetheme and Omega.
People like Zen because its well coded and, depsite it complexity, really doesn't do too much (which is a good thing, if that is what you need). It extremly versitile, and while I would consider this a power themers theme a lot of new users succeed.
Adaptivetheme and Omega have a lot of built in end user tools for controlling the layout and other aspects of theming that otherwise you would have to write code to achieve. These themes tend to appeal to three very different audiences - the CSS themer/designer, the site builder and the development shop who need to support mobile (both are responsive base themes) but do not have the time or in house resources to scale up to do this from scratch (you would be very surprised at the actual technology running behind the scenes in these themes in order to achieve this, its very complex). Both themes are very easy to get started with, arguably Adaptivetheme is easier due to Omega doing some really weird shit with debugging and default styles (you have to figure out how to disable them).
Fusion, well I don't know. I think its kind of lost its place at the moment due to the rise of responsive design, it was very popular on Drupal 6 because it had some nice sub-themes and is reasonably easy to get started with.
If you are into clean, semantic and light code, well then its Zen or Adaptivetheme or one of the lessor known themes such as Mothership or Arctica. If you like a lot of code redundancy (i.e. bloated markup and classes) then you might like Fusion. Omega lies somewhere in the middle, perhaps more at the "bloated" end of the scale.
If SEO features are important, then its got to be Zen or Adaptivetheme, all the others don't care about this at all, they are slow, bloated, are not content source ordered and have no extra features that will help with semantics or content find-ability.
Same goes for accessibility - Adaptivetheme and Zen have ARIA roles and are content source ordered. Both are WCAG2 compliant, I don't know about the others.
For mobile, then my two picks are going to be Zen 7.x-5.x or Adaptivetheme 7.x-3.x - these are two themes in a class or their own when, the former for the power themers, the latter for the sheer speed at which you can get cross device, cross browser themes up and running the very advanced auto-magical support for mobile and responsive design (no theme in Drupal can match it features right now, its just way way more advanced).
If you need responsive Panels and support for responsive node content layout (using Display Suite), again, there is only one real winner here - Adaptivetheme.
Pimp your Drupal 8 Toolbar - make it badass.
Adaptivetheme - theming system for people who don't code.
Base themes
Good answer. I have been using Omega and there is certainly a learning curve to using this. Issues I have come across on a recent project include:
If you have time, creating you own base theme may be a consideration and could save you from the learning curve associated with any new base theme.
I have to agree with Jeff here
Just so you can appreciate he's saying it straight:
In light of all this, you can't go wrong with AdaptiveTheme. And if you do the club thing, (small price) you get some take-home demo sites that show you how to integrate all sorts of nifty features. I like learning by example--it guides my footsteps in a very untame landscape.
My two bits
hope it helps someone.
d
Useful
Very useful, thanks. I am always scared off by Zen's complexity, but will have a look at it and "adaptivetheme" now for projects going forward. I have used "basic" and "hunchbaque" until now.
Omega theme vs Zen
Yes I would agree that Omega has some issues with SEO standards which is handled very well on Zen. We used Omega on one of our projects which was for a client who was very particular about SEO stuff and for a few of them to get into Omega... we really had a hard time.
Now I feel we should have invested a bit more time on ground work so that we could have used Zen instead of Omega (must say we were a bit scared with the Zen theme and the number of CSS at first) :P
Comparison
Comparison at http://drupal.org/node/1399848#comment-6718202
Some good themes
Hi there.
I personally like the Marinelli 7.x-3.0-beta11 theme as it looks sleek and it incorporates many handy features such as dropdown menus and an image slideshow at the top. However, there are so many themes out there that also can make your website look great such as Acquia Marina and Danland.
Even though the Adaptive
Even though the Adaptive theme seems to have many hours of work on it, I don't agree with Jeff's reaction to the comment of Mediasaur. I'm sure all of us have some stuff we're not really proud of back when we started writing markup and CSS. I don't think the appropriate answer to critique is "but your code sucks too".
Back on subject, I think any kind of framework or toolset or library always adds a layer of abstraction by making decisions for you. That's an opinionated framework. Adaptive seems to have many "on/off" switches so you can customize to a point.
I think there are two groups of users/devs. Judging from the initial answer from zanymonster "I want quick, easy.. and pretty" he seems to belong (and maybe I'm wrong) to the group of people who expect to install a theme, click a couple of UI buttons and have a magical website. Sorry to disappoint but that NEVER happens.
Then there's a second group who prefers to write stuff from scratch.
The golden rule is somewhere in the middle;
Trying to understand and master a tool, use it to your advantage. That probably includes customizing, stripping out unwanted bits of code, and eventually even forking it and re-writing bits and pieces in a different way.
I'm currently reviewing advanced contrib themes for a long-term large-scale gov project and looking at Adaptive these days. I see many things that I'll use myself, others that I would differently and many others I don't really need.
Actually I agree with you, I
Actually I agree with you, I think I was bit rude and unfair, these days I am more mellow and really big huggy nice guy around town, while nothing I said was untrue, I did not take well to some pretty aggressive attacks thereafter, however, initially one should be more, how can I say, tactful?
Pimp your Drupal 8 Toolbar - make it badass.
Adaptivetheme - theming system for people who don't code.
I have to say though, that
I have to say though, that the post you responded to (Media's) was actually very unhelpful and -bad- for new users.
You (Jeff) are totally right. Media is advocating for hand-writing code and implying that it will always be better. This isn't an accurate statement, and I'd hate to see a new member listen to him.
Thankfully, you (Jeff) gave really good advice to the first poster, who apparently is very happy using AdaptiveTheme. If you hadn't responded so critically to Media, the new user may have thought that Media was right, and that you can actually simply & quickly build a robust theme.
I think it is good that Drupal has strong defenders like Jeff--the single worst thing about many open-source communities is the lack of curation/refinement to help documentation. It is nearly impossible as a new user to a project to be able to evaluate and rank "best practices"--Jeff really helped with that in this case!
I provide free Drupal support on Thursdays: booking calendar coming soon.
Great presentation on the subject
by Andrea Panisson, DrupalDay Rome 2012
http://prezi.com/17jnbtz1tkj_/which-base-theme-for-your-drupal-project/
update
I settled on adaptive and have had great success with it. It does almost everything I want and is great! I basically just started with a cooy of the base them and was able to configure it, blocks, views, etc, then style it using sweaver. Works great for me! I am (admittedly) quite a hack, but found success this way without having to custom program anything, excepting some css (of course).
Hey, thats great feedback to
Hey, thats great feedback to know you succeeded with Sweaver over Adaptivetheme, I have never really had the time to do such a thing, so really nice to hear about that.
Pimp your Drupal 8 Toolbar - make it badass.
Adaptivetheme - theming system for people who don't code.